Beatniks & Rednecks
Originally posted at Dean’s World: A Best Submission!
I’m not much into lifestyles anymore. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more family-focused, and group-identity is down there with “paint the basement walls” in terms of priorities. But one group that I’ve always liked were the Beatniks of the 40s and 50s.
I still have the copy of “On the Road” that I read in high school, took to college, then to Japan, Africa and finally to middle age in Suburbia. Opening the book today it is hard not to feel the rush, the flight into the unknown, the celebration of living and breathing and “being” that Kerouac captured in that work. “On the Road” is a long trip across America and through the human spirit, and even as I live in the same house I’ve lived in for years, the book still tempts me to grab the Wife, the Kid and the Pets and just start driving West – job, mortgage and credit card debt be damned.
I got to thinking about the Beats at a parish carnival the Family visited Saturday night. The parish was in a working class part of town where liquor stores and gas stations compete with one another for prime space along the main boulevard before it ends at the Interstate. The Wife noticed that the people in the crowd seemed to wear their tax brackets on their faces, prematurely aged from a life of hard work, hard living, and hard playing. Cigarettes were ubiquitous, and it was impossible to get away from the smoke. Hip-Hop culture dominated the predominantly white crowd, but there were a large number of mixed-race families and a few Latinos, one wearing a silk-screen of the black Virgin Mary with the words “La Raza Unida” printed underneath. Was the shirt racist? I asked to the Wife. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she wisely replied.
I felt like an outsider, but I usually do in large crowds which is why I do my best to avoid them. But the Kid loves carnivals and being a Parent trumps personal likes or dislikes, so we had gone together. As I stood in line, watching the Ferris Wheel “Carny” work the ride, I noticed that unlike the board expressions shown by the other Carnies, the man seemed to enjoy his job. He was polite to the riders and even joked with them as he manned the throttle, locked the pipe railing, and warned each rider to mind the latch.
The Beatniks came from working-class backgrounds for the most part, but they were intellectuals too. Some of them had served in World War 2 – Kerouac in the Merchant Marine which during the War wasn’t exactly the safest job – and others, like Allen Ginsberg, came from academia. Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s muse for their early works, even came from a hard-scrabble background of a drunk and abusive father.
They were not elitist – or at least they didn’t start out to be. The Beats celebrated the Working Man. They appreciated the artistry and skill shown by workers doing their jobs, a concept which connected them spiritually to Zen Buddhism as exemplified by the poetry of Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photographer Robert Frank’s landmark work, The Americans, shows slices of everyday American life and manages to convey the beauty and perpetual motion of its land and people in a way missed by the Look and Life photographers of the era.
I’m speaking in generalizations somewhat here, which happens whenever you talk about groups of people – especially those counting “loners” like Kerouac and “socialites” like Ginsberg as members. But it struck me as I walked through the crowd that the Beats were the last counter-culture group that weren’t elitist. Ever since the Beats evolved into the Hippies of the ‘60s and the Hippies found themselves at odds with the “common people”, the counter-culture has been elitist and when that counterculture became “pop” culture, that elitism came too.
Today’s pop culture sneers at what it calls “Red States” or the “Nascar Crowd” – yet the Red States continue to swell with immigrants from other states and NASCAR remains the fastest growing sport in America. Green Day may make a killing on calling them “American Idiots” yet the same people that buy their records continue to enlist in the military. I wandered through the crowd and realized that this was the America that remains undefeatable. It was a crowd that wouldn’t be losing any sleep over the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo and probably cared as much about America’s image abroad as they did about Michael Moore’s grooming habits or lack thereof.
And I realized that the elites come and go, but these people will always be here. They might have a few more piercings and tattoos than their predecessors, but they will remain solid and steadfast, constituting – dare I say? – the bedrock of American society.
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